dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

I guess I'm on something of a poetry kick these days. The following has been one of my favorites since high school.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilifred Owen 1893-1918

The last line is from an old Latin poem. It translates to "It is sweet and right to die for one's country."

Today is Israel's Memorial day for it's fallen soldiers. One day, maybe we'll move away the paradigm of romanticizing brutal violence in the name of abstract ideas.

one goat (pesach part 1 of ?)

One of the best-known Passover songs is חד גדיא (Chad Gadya), usually translated as “An Only Kid" (kid like baby goat). Sung towards the end of the Pesach Seder, it is a cumulative-counting song like “I knew and old woman who swallowed a fly.” The final verse of Chad Gadya goes:

“And Came the Holy One Blessed be He [G-d] and slew the Angel of Death that slaughtered the slaughterer that slaughtered the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat that father bought for Two Zuzim, one goat, one goat.”

There are a lot of interpretations of the song. Perhaps the most common understanding is that it is a nonsensical song that keeps children awake and gives them something to look forward to at the end of a really long meal.

Another interpretation (the two are not mutually exclusive) is that it is about the history of the land of Israel. Each character represents someone who has lived in/conquered the land of Israel. The goat represents the Jews, acquired with the two tablets of the Ten Comandments. The cat is Assyria, the Dog Babylon, the stick Persia, the fire Greece, the water Rome, the ox the Byzantine Empire, the slaughterer the Crusaders, the Angel of the Death the Ottoman Empire. G-d, representing himself, has the final word.

It isn’t exactly the most uplifting of interpretations. Then again, neither is human history. I think the song very accurately reflects the helplessness of being stuck in a cycle of violence.

The following is poem from one of the Hebrew language’s great poets. Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. He escaped to British Palestine and became a member of the Palmach, a violent Jewish paramilitary organization that was important to the Jewish victory in the 1948 War of Independence. Later in life his politics shifted. He became and advocate of peace and reconciliation and worked with Arab writers on creating works along those themes.

This poem has many layers of religious, social, historical and personal meaning. It was written between 1948 and 1967. During that period, Jerusalem was a divided city (at least differently divided from today). The topography of the poem is the no-man’s-land that separated Jordan from Israel; a dangerous place that was shot at by both sides.

An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet
above the Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gadya machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.

-Yehuda Amichai; translated by Chana Block

I have a lot to say and write about this poem. But rather than bore you with my over-analysis, I'll summarize briefly. In Judaism and Christianity, Abraham the Patriarch was called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac not so very far from the action of the poem. The Islamic tradition holds that it was Abraham’s other son, Ishmael, father of the Arab people, who was nearly sacrificed on that occasion. And the Prophet Mohamed’s revelation occurred while searching for a lost goat, in a dream about that same spot.

Amichai’s poem is beautiful; it brought me to tears when I first read it. It refocuses historical and religious conflicts in the light of what is possible; the founding of a new religion (which might be better translated as “knowledge” in this case) versus the perpetuation of existing destructive patterns. I wonder how deeply in our consciousness these patterns and cycles are inscribed. It seems to me that they go back a long way, across a great many cultures. But in all three Abrahamic faiths G-d stopped Abraham from perpetuating the cycle of violence that was the sacrifice of children (a somewhat common practice in the region at the time). G-d isn’t so directly involved anymore (whether or he ever was is another discussion). So now in this day and age, and in this iteration of Amichai’s “Chad Gadya Machine,” it falls to human beings to play the part of the Angel who stays Abraham's knife wielding hand as it prepares to start the cycle over again.

Next year, whether I am in a rebuilt Jerusalem or not, I’ll read this poem after we sing “Chad Gadya.”

palm sunday

So, one might wonder why a nice Jewish boy like me is posting something about Palm Sunday and Easter on his blog. Especially given that his blog is named after part of the Passover liturgy and it is, right now, Passover. It doesn't really matter. My passover piece is in the works. But it doesn't involve parades or popes or incense or anything nearly as exciting as this morning's Coptic Palm Sunday Celebration.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built where, according to the Catholic and various Orthodox Churches, Jesus was crucified and buried and where he came back to life a little less than 2000 years ago. It is an exciting place to be on Easter. But given that the Western and Eastern Churches use different calculations to compute the date of Easter, when I thought it I was going to see Easter Celebrations, I actually happened in on the Coptic Archbishop of Jerusalem and his Palm Sunday procession around the shrine which used to be the cave (the cave itself was removed in order to build the church). The Copts are an Egyptian group who broke off from the rest of the church in the 400s CE (long before the reformation). The Coptic Pope lives in Alexandria, Egypt.



The whole experience was beautiful, full of incense, pendants, robes of every imaginable color and monks of every imaginable size and style. It was different from any Catholic event I've been too. It felt more chaotic and less sterile. The Archbishop wore sunglasses (and a crown, he's pictured to the right). People wailed and cheered and cried as they reached out to touch the marchers and received olive sprigs and palm fronds in return. Other spectators held up their splendidly dressed babies and sang along to the hymns.

It was really interesting to get to watch Easter (well pre-Easter really) commemorated in the place where that particular miracle is supposed to have happened. My roommate and I were swept up in the power of the moment and stayed watching it unfold around us for almost and hour. Then we left, walked through the Old City for a while and finally bought kosher-for-passover ice cream.

spring

Passover, in the States, preempts spring by as many as six weeks depending on how early or late it falls in the calendar. So although I've always known that is a holiday of the spring, even when it's been very warm for March in Maine or New York, it's never really felt like spring.

But in just the past week, it has become full on beautiful in bloom spring here in Israel. I've seen so many new things bloom and blossom that I've lost count. Here are a few photos of things I discovered just this morning as I was walking around doing last minute Pesach preparations.


Above is a fig tree. Complete with a tiny fig that seems like it sprouted overnight


These are an interesting fruit called Sheseq in Hebrew, and Loquat in English. It is not related to the Kumquat, but shares a similar etymology from Cantonese. They are related to apples and pears, and turn a beautiful pale orange color when ripe. A friend of mine most accurately described the flavor as that of a hypothetical "lemon-peach."


The bizzare alien probosci coming from the date palm pictured above are seed pods. The emerged slowly and I wasn't quite sure whether I should be alarmed or intrigued. This morning I saw one that had burst open. And there were the countless immature dates pictured below.



Tonight is the Passover Seder. I'll be spending it with some good friends. We'll be spending time thinking about the contemporary relevance of the liberation story, especially in light of the mess that is politics in this little strip of land. I'll try and post something about it soon.

almonds, revisited

You might remember from a few posts ago that the almond trees were blossoming. Well, now as spring has progressed, the almond trees have young almonds on them. They're edible, although to be honest a little strange. The green fuzz on the photo below is the outer layer of the fruit of which the almond is the pit (like a peach pit). This layer is removed before what we think of as whole almonds are sold. The white layer in the middle (in the photo) is what develops into what we know as the shell, and inside of that is a clear jelly, which is the immature nut. My vegetable guy told me to wash them, salt them, and eat them, fuzz included. Not bad, but not great either. They don't really taste like almonds. I'm told in three weeks or so they'll start to have a slight amaretto flavor and the fuzz will no longer be edible. A few weeks after that the shell matures, finally followed by the nut.

I'll keep you posted if any of those stages turn out to be wonderful.